SHOW: Sept 1-6, Greene 201. LECTURE: Wed Sept 3, Greene Gallery 6pm.

From September 1st-6th, the exhibition of faculty member Ted Ngai will be on display at the Greene Building.

The Sept 3rd presentation will begin at 6pm in the Greene Gallery, where Ngai will lecture on his experiences abroad, followed by a reception at Room 201.

Ted Ngai: Material Agency

“Non-anthropocentric form, in this case, is a geological formation that “decorates” caves known as secondary deposits, or speleothem. Speleogenesis is the process that generates what we are familiar with as stalactite and stalagmite, both of which are a form of dripstone that, as the name suggest, forms due to dripping. However, there are many more varieties of such formations. While most of the formations are based on the same mechanism, a re-deposition of limestone dissolved by carbonic acid, local parameters such as climatic conditions – humidity, wind speed and direction, and geochemical character – the chemical makeup of the location, play an important role in determining its ultimate form. These geological forms are thus not only global in the sense that one can find them everywhere on earth, but are also local in that no two cave decorations are the same.

This travel’s intent is to look at speleogenesis as earth’s geological 3D printing process and speleomorphology as nature’s rigorous formal study of how global and local parameters interact to create variations in form and color.”